Quoting Nilay Patel

According to Nilay Patel, in commentary featured on Simon Willison's Weblog, building practical augmented reality glasses requires putting a camera next to your eyes that continuously records and processes everything you see. The technical reality is unforgiving: no chip small enough to fit in glasses can deliver the processing power needed while remaining energy-efficient enough to run in real time. That means sending the data to the cloud—or building something as large and battery-dependent as Apple's Vision Pro. The unavoidable consequence is that making the next-generation AR product everyone imagines requires continuous surveillance of your visual world at scale. Patel argues there's a compelling case for not building it at all, suggesting the societal cost of the required tradeoffs is simply too high.

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